Twelve days of Christmas

[ladyofastolat]

It seems that while everyone who sings The Twelve Days of Christmas agrees on what arrived on the first 8 days, everything goes horribly wrong after that. Lots of people seem to be passionately convinced that their version is "the right one", even as printed books give a variety of different answers. So, once again, when faced with a contraversial issue, I appeal to my friends list on LJ to conclusively prove what it right.

(Just imagine how much easier things would have been in the past if people had been able to recourse to the LJ poll to answer such issues. Can't work out when Easter will be celebrated in your kingdom? Post the LJ Poll of Whitby to find out. Simples!)

But, anyway...



[Poll #1499758]

Comments

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

Actually, my own poll didn't take into account my own preferred answer. I definitely originally learnt it with 12 lords and 11 ladies, but can never remember which way round the drummers and pipers go. I voted for what felt ever so slightly more "right" to me, but who knows?

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I'm in the same boat, and took the same course. I do notice that my children have quite a different order, though.

But in a different part of the forest, are you for colly birds or calling birds? I learned colly, but I've heard the other one more and more in recent years.

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

I've always sung "calling birds." I've read that it was originally "colly birds", but got changed in recent decades by people who didn't know what "colly birds" were, but I've only ever sung it, or heard it sung, as "calling birds."

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

I don't know what colly birds are. Are they used to herd flying sheep?

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

Indeed. Back in Ancient Yore, land rents were so expensive that some enterprising peasants in deepest Essex trained their sheep to be airborne, and employed intelligent, trained pigeons to round them up. Buoyed by their success, the peasants in question turned their attention to those animals that were so vital to the winter sustenance of the poor: pigs. Their bulk proved a challenge, but the enterprising peasants they were confident that they would get them airborne soon. The expression "when pigs fly," now taken to mean "never," originally meant something very different. "The labouring man will be free from the tyranny of the landlord when pigs fly," was a pure statement of fact, and meant "round about next October, once we've ironed a few little problems."

Understandably, the landlords hated the idea, not only because it would free the peasants from being tied to the land, but because their mansions and castles soon became drenched in the droppings of the flying flocks. And that is the origin of the noble art of falconry: invented first to take down the "collie birds" that kept the flying sheep from straying. This was in many ways the first Battle of Britain, fought between hawk and pigeon, between falcon and lamb, and it was won, as were so many other things in Ancient Yore, by the rich. Never again would the common people of England dream of putting sheep in the air. Most poignantly of all, "when pigs fly" ceased to be a stirring promise of coming liberty, but came to express the graveyard of crushed hopes - "never."

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

Alternatively, they're blackbirds, colly meaning "black like coal."

[the-marquis.livejournal.com]

oh how pedestrian compared to your history